January 11, 2013 AT 4:50 pm

Resistor Color Code Tattoo

I finally got my new tattoo yesterday. I’ve been meaning to get this done for the past two years, but being a nomad and being able to get appointments from good tattoo artist is a bit rough. Luckily Marcio Bornholdt at Blut & Eisen in Berlin had an open slot and was up for doing my tattoo on short notice, as I already had all the design files ready to go. There’s a ton here, despite the plain look.

The most obvious thing is the resistor color codes. Doing electronics for a living, that’s kind of easy to see why I would get such a thing done. However, that’s a very small portion of the population that will initially recognize it. Most people tend to see just the rainbow, and that leads to lots of fun questions. I’m openly bisexual, and have done queer geeks panels at both CCC-Camp 2011 and again at 28c3. So I’m fine with the ambiguity, which adds itself into the meaning of the tattoo for me.

2 Comments

A good mnemonic is less painful although I think most of those for resistor codes are either lame or offensive.
But try breaking it into chunks like triplets…
‘Black, brown, red’
‘Orange, yellow, green’
‘Blue, violet, grey’
‘White!’